Stardust

(Reuters) - Twice U.S. Masters champion Jose Maria Olazabal, Briton Justin Rose and American Jason Dufner will join several other big names at this month's Qatar Masters, organizers said on Tuesday. World number four Rose and ninth-ranked Dufner join former world number one Martin Kaymer and Ryder Cup teammates Sergio Garcia and Paul Lawrie, who announced on Monday they would play in the $2.5 million event. Olazabal, 46, captained Europe to a memorable comeback...

"David Bowie Is," the exhibition catalog for the "David Bowie Is" retrospective that opened recently at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (currently breaking museum-attendance records, and running through August), is vast. "David Bowie Is," the coffee-table book, is also a pleasant orange. That's the first thing you notice: The front is orange, the back is orange, many interior graphics are orange; on the front, faded into a sunset hue, Bowie as youthful and spiky, that...

"Stardust" is director Matthew Vaughn's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's fantasy tale about a young man's (Charlie Cox) quest to find a fallen star (Claire Danes) to present to the town beauty (Sienna Miller). Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro also star. Vaughn, 36, recently chatted about his career and his friendship with Guy Ritchie. Q. Let's see; you have produced a couple of gritty gangster films ("Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and "Snatch") and you directed another one...

(Reuters) - Twice U.S. Masters champion Jose Maria Olazabal, Briton Justin Rose and American Jason Dufner will join several other big names at this month's Qatar Masters, organizers said on Tuesday. World number four Rose and ninth-ranked Dufner join former world number one Martin Kaymer and Ryder Cup teammates Sergio Garcia and Paul Lawrie, who announced on Monday they would play in the $2.5 million event. Olazabal, 46, captained Europe to a memorable comeback...

The Stardust is just a memory. The casino-hotel on the Las Vegas Strip was imploded early Tuesday in a hail of fireworks to make way for Boyd Gaming Corp.'s $4.4 billion mega-resort Echelon. Hundreds partied nearby before the blast. The casino opened in 1958, billing itself as the world's largest resort hotel with 1,032 rooms. It was credited with being Las Vegas' first mass-market casino. "There was this implicit idea that invisible high rollers came in and funded everything, so that Mr. and...

Back in the day, the thought of watching a little desert golf would bring a smile to the frostbitten PGA Tour fan. Snowbound hacks could flip on the TV and catch Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller and Lee Trevino chasing birdies on the sun-splashed playgrounds at the Bob Hope Classic. Their showbiz playing partners, meanwhile, chased yuks. That was then. These days, "desert golf" points to a different locale — Abu Dhabi. The United Arab Emirates is where...

Arnold Morton, a man who looks and dresses like a college professor but who behaves like a ringmaster, is at it again. Arnie--this is what anybody who is anybody calls Mr. Morton--is currently offering the latest in his inexhaustible series of entertainment experiments. We have, over the years, sampled a number of these: From an Olivia Newton-John look-alike contest to Zorine's After Midnight, his Limelight-before-there-was-a-Limelight attempt to attract the purple-orange-green...

"Stardust" is director Matthew Vaughn's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's fantasy tale about a young man's (Charlie Cox) quest to find a fallen star (Claire Danes) to present to the town beauty (Sienna Miller). Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro also star. Vaughn, 36, recently chatted about his career and his friendship with Guy Ritchie. Q. Let's see; you have produced a couple of gritty gangster films ("Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and "Snatch") and you directed another one...

Michelle Pfeiffer has been bracing herself for it all summer, that moment when a reporter would use "the c-word" to describe her re-emergence in the movies. "Nobody's saying 'comeback,' " she said. "It surprises me that I haven't been hearing that, because I would think that, too, about me." Absent from the screen for five years, she departed with a bang -- a murderous mom in "White Oleander." But one of the most beautiful women in the movies followed that acclaimed...

NEW THIS WEEK 'Stardust' Rating: PG-13 for fantasy violence and some risque humor. What it's about: A star falls and a boy promises it to his fickle girlfriend, only to discover the star is, herself, pretty cute. The Kid Attractor Factor: A quick-witted fantasy for those in the process of outgrowing Harry Potter. Good lessons/bad lessons: Your fantasy love may keep you from seeing the real thing, right under your nose. And even in alternate universes, safe sex is a must.

Theater buffs are scratching their heads over "Stardust," an all-but-unknown musical that has materialized at the Wilshire Theatre with a hodgepodge of big names attached. It features as unlikely a collection of headliners as anyone could imagine: recording artist Toni Tennille, film actress Sean Young and three-time Tony Award winner Hinton Battle. The production team is just as unusual. Erte, the legendary Art Deco artist, designed the costumes and sets as his last major...

'STARDUST' . "Stardust" has its moments, most of them plot-unrelated. The highlight is a patter routine wherein Robert De Niro, as a cross-dressing pirate, haggles over the price of some fenced goods with a disreputable fellow played by Ricky Gervais. The way these two negotiate back and forth it's like Faerie Kingdom vaudeville, a distant cousin to the Billy Crystal and Carol Kane routines in "The Princess Bride." Most of "Stardust," alas, has no time for such detours. The story began as an illustrated...

Singer Betty Buckley is set to star in "Stardust," a musical portrait of the four decades from the 1920s through the 1950s, with Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller among the composers represented. Included in the almost three dozen songs will be "Sweet Lorraine," "Sophisticated Lady," "Deep Purple" and, need it be said, "Stardust." The $2.5 million musical, with a cast of eight, is being produced by Louise Westergaard and is to begin Feb. 20 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, with...

Michelle Pfeiffer has been bracing herself for it all summer, that moment when a reporter would use "the c-word" to describe her re-emergence in the movies. "Nobody's saying 'comeback,' " she said. "It surprises me that I haven't been hearing that, because I would think that, too, about me." Absent from the screen for five years, she departed with a bang -- a murderous mom in "White Oleander." But one of the most beautiful women in the movies followed that acclaimed...

Decades after Hoagy Carmichael wrote the song "Stardust," researchers at the University of Chicago validated the tune's romantic sentiments by discovering diamonds among the dust expelled by exploding stars. "No one predicted that," said Roy Lewis, one of the first scientists who discovered the precious gems. "We were trying to understand the origin of strange isotopes of xenon we'd detected." By extracting grains of dust from fallen meteorites, scientists are supplementing information...

If there were ever a moment the moviegoing public might suffer from a case of pixie-dust poisoning, now's the time. With Hogwarts, hobbits and all manner of hobgoblins haunting theaters, the obvious question has to be raised: Has film's fixation with fantasy run its course? Not so, says producer and director Matthew Vaughn. The man behind "Layer Cake" is out with "Stardust," his adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel that opens Friday. The movie about a young man who discovers a magic...

'STARDUST' . "Stardust" has its moments, most of them plot-unrelated. The highlight is a patter routine wherein Robert De Niro, as a cross-dressing pirate, haggles over the price of some fenced goods with a disreputable fellow played by Ricky Gervais. The way these two negotiate back and forth it's like Faerie Kingdom vaudeville, a distant cousin to the Billy Crystal and Carol Kane routines in "The Princess Bride." Most of "Stardust," alas, has no time for such detours. The story began as an illustrated...

The Stardust is just a memory. The casino-hotel on the Las Vegas Strip was imploded early Tuesday in a hail of fireworks to make way for Boyd Gaming Corp.'s $4.4 billion mega-resort Echelon. Hundreds partied nearby before the blast. The casino opened in 1958, billing itself as the world's largest resort hotel with 1,032 rooms. It was credited with being Las Vegas' first mass-market casino. "There was this implicit idea that invisible high rollers came in and funded everything, so that Mr. and...